June 15, 2022

Today's Topics

Hi! We have 3 charts for you today exploring:

  • Internet Explorer. The fall of the iconic browser.
  • Zooming out. Stocks are in a bear market. Sometimes it's helpful to zoom out.
  • EGOT. The most elite club in entertainment.
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Internet Explorer is hanging up its bookmarks, as Microsoft support for the once dominant browser ends today, some 27 years since it was first introduced.

Internet Explorer's market share was estimated at one point to be as high as 90%, primarily because of the success of the Windows operating system, which often stipulated users use Internet Explorer — a practice that got Microsoft in trouble with the Justice Department in the late '90s.

Closer to the Edge

The writing has been on the wall for Internet Explorer for some time, as Microsoft has pushed users towards its latest browser — Microsoft Edge — for the last few years. Unfortunately, Edge hasn't exactly caught on. The latest data from StatCounter shows Edge with only a 4% share of the browser market, way down on Apple's Safari, which has just shy of 20% of the market, and nowhere near the dominant Google Chrome, which has 65%.

Speed matters

Though some may look back with fond nostalgia, Internet Explorer was often criticized for being slow, cumbersome, buggy and insecure. Those flaws may not have been fatal when Microsoft's competition was relatively lean, but when Google launched Chrome in 2008, suddenly Microsoft had a rival that could match its resources, and was starting from a blank canvas.

Almost immediately Chrome had a lot going for it; faster loading speeds, tabs that crashed less frequently (and didn't affect your other tabs when they did crash), dedicated Chromebooks, third-party extensions and did we mention faster loading speeds? Within a few years Chrome was the dominant browser. Ironically, if you fire up Google Search and type "why is chrome" you'll see the top auto-filled suggestion — by Google's very own search engine — is "why is chrome so slow". What goes around, comes around.

The bears are coming

US stocks are officially in a bear market, with the S&P 500 Index closing down 22% below its previous peak yesterday as investors sold stocks for any number of valid concerns.

As we've discussed previously, the tech-heavy NASDAQ and other market trackers had already breached the 20% decline threshold, but this is the first time the broader S&P 500 Index has done so... at least since March 2020.

Zooming out

A 22% fall in the value of stocks in a little over 6 months isn't really good news for anyone, but sometimes it's helpful to zoom out and get some perspective. Looking back 18 months shows that the index is basically back to where it was at the start of 2021, which isn't too terrifying, and on a really long horizon this latest crash looks a lot like the crashes that have come before it, all of which eventually saw the market recover and move higher.

Among a long list of valid concerns, inflation (and the Fed's response to fight it) is probably number one, which is why all eyes are on today's interest-rate decision where investors are expecting a 0.75% rate hike — which would be the biggest move upward for 28 years.

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Master of all trades

Taking home just one of the biggest awards in entertainment is a dream for many artists and performers.

But some manage to receive the biggest awards in every major discipline — earning them a place in the EGOT club. This week Jennifer Hudson joined that club, winning a Tony Award as a producer for A Strange Loop.

That makes Hudson the 17th person to have won a top award in television (Emmy), music (Grammy), film (Oscar) and theatre (Tony). She joins a star-studded list of actors, artists, producers and creatives including John Legend, Whoopi Goldberg, Audrey Hepburn and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Perhaps most impressive on this list is songwriter Robert Lopez, who strung together his first four wins in just 9 years, and has since gone on to become the first member of the "double EGOT" club, claiming each award at least twice for his songwriting on Frozen, The Book of Mormon, Coco and more.

More Data

1) Coinbase is laying off 18% of its workforce, about 1,000 employees, citing a "crypto winter". We wrote about tech layoffs last week here.

2) Ford has recalled 2.9 million vehicles that are at risk of rolling away when parked.

3) Some good news for your wallet amidst the bad: the US dollarhas hit a 20-year-high, suggesting that you should get a little more vacation for your buck if you go abroad.

4) New data shows extraordinarily fast global warming in the Barents Sea in the Arctic Ocean, with warming up to seven times the speed of the global average.

5) The data upload cheat code: 96% of companies surveyed by Flatfile have said they've run into problems with data onboarding. If your business is one of the 96%, try Flatfile's data onboarding platform.**

6) Your breakfast eggs just got a lot more boring; a shortage of spicy sauce Sriracha is coming.

7) Apple has signed a 10-year-deal with Major League Soccer to broadcast the matches on its TV+ service, its latest investment into exclusive content.

**This sponsored content helps us keep this newsletter free.

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